


The Captain Britain Needs (although possibly not the one she expected)

by ozhawk



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Captain Britain - Freeform, Excalibur, F/M, crackfic, king arthur - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-07 09:25:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16405745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozhawk/pseuds/ozhawk
Summary: Captain Britain, in Marvel-616 (main comics continuity) was Brian Braddock, twin brother of Elizabeth (Betsy) aka Psylocke. However, when researching him, I discovered that he was given his powers by Merlyn and that there is a Captain Britain ‘in every possible alternate universe’.This is a way in which I’d love the MCU to get its own Captain Britain!





	1. Chapter 1

He was trapped. Again.

“Why is it always the bloody boot?” Hunter groused to himself, feeling desperately around for the safety catch. Those bastards had fucking removed it, he finally realised. He had no way out until they pulled him out, no way to get to Bob, to help her. Agonised, he shut his eyes, squeezing them for a minute.

It had seemed like such a simple job. Hunter had liked Pete Wisdom the moment the fella introduced himself; he’d seemed straight-up and the intel he’d given them had certainly been good. Wisdom had been a little vague on exactly why his own MI-13 people couldn’t infiltrate the neo-Nazi cell themselves, but he was offering bloody good money and both Hunter and Bobbi fit the bill physically. Bobbi, with her height and her blonde, blue-eyed beauty, was the absolute ideal that the extremists were looking for.

He hadn’t realised until too late that their leader really wasn’t impressed that Bobbi already had a husband. By then they were well and truly embedded in the cell, and the smooth bastard was doing his level best to get into Bobbi’s knickers.

Hunter knocked his head on the floor of the boot. It was his own fucking jealousy that had got him in this situation, he freely acknowledged. Bobbi had no intention of sleeping with the Shithead (as Hunter was now calling him) but she did plan to flirt, to use the attraction to get close, to find out more about the cell’s plans.

Hunter hadn’t been able to take it. Seeing Bobbi on the Shithead’s arm, his fat pink hand stroking her slender thigh, had snapped something inside him. He’d jumped the gun and decided to search the command bunker.

Well, he’d found the plans, all right, but he’d been caught, and Bobbi was ‘convicted’ right along with him of being a spy. And now they were both being taken to locations unknown, for purposes undoubtedly nefarious. He only hoped that Bobbi was being taken to the same place. Together they might just possibly have a chance of kicking enough neo-Nazi arse that one of them might get away to warn Wisdom of the very real and serious threat to the country.

Lance Hunter had already tried to give his life more than half a dozen times to protect Bobbi. He’d somehow never managed it. This time, though, this was something bigger. This time he had to succeed, because it wasn’t just Bobbi he was protecting. It was the land of his birth, the home of his people.

Mother England.

“ _This_ is an unexpected surprise,” a voice said, and Hunter’s eyes snapped open; how had he not felt the car stop?

_How was he no longer in the car???_

He was still lying down, curled in the foetal position with wrists and ankles secured together with zip ties, but he now appeared to be in some sort of cave. He couldn’t see any visible light source, but the walls were glowing faintly golden - and there was an old geezer sitting at a table a few feet away, just now turning to look at him.

“I’m feeling kind of surprised too,” Hunter said, “don’t suppose you can cut me loose?”

“Certainly,” the old geezer said, getting up, and bringing with him, not a pair of scissors or a penknife, no, an absolutely bloody _massive_ sword.

“Fuck me, what?” Hunter tried to scramble backwards.

“The only sharp tool I have on hand, I’m afraid,” Old Geezer said apologetically, and with surprising delicacy flicked just the very tip of the sword at the cable ties.

The archaic weapon had to be bloody sharp, Hunter acknowledged, as the plastic parted like butter. Old Geezer stepped back, set the sword down on the table again and sat down, as though suddenly exhausted.

A little unsure of just what the hell was going on, Hunter sat up slowly, got to his feet. “Excuse me if I seem rude,” he said, “but where the bloody hell am I, and who the fuck are you?”

Old Geezer actually smiled, as though amused, gestured to a chair opposite him. “Please, sit down.”

Hunter didn’t see that he had much choice. The cave had no visible exit. Slowly, he sat down, looking at the table. The sword was the only thing on it, apart from a flat wooden box a little bigger than his hand.

“My name is Merlyn, and you are in the Heart of Avalon,” Old Geezer said conversationally. “And your name?”

“Lance Hunter,” he said, almost by instinct, and then “Wait. Merlyn? Avalon?”

“Yes, _that_ Merlyn and _that_ Avalon, Lancelot. It has been many centuries since you walked this earth.”

“Lance, not Lancelot,” Hunter said hurriedly.

Merlyn gave him a secretive little smile.

“Okay, I’m hallucinating, right? Overcome by engine fumes.”

“I’m afraid not.”

Merlyn’s eyes were like polished black pebbles, peering out from beneath bushy grey eyebrows. Hunter couldn’t look into them for long.

“So, what?” he said finally.

“You have a mission you must complete. For Britain. Your need was great enough to bring you here, where few have ever come before. I see in you strength enough, and so I am empowered to offer you a choice. You may take up the Sword of Might, or the Amulet of Right.” Reaching out, Merlyn opened the wooden box, revealing a golden pendant with a deep red stone set in it, hanging from a heavy cord.

“And the catch is…?” Hunter asked suspiciously.

Merlyn smiled. “The Sword is the path of violence, the Amulet the path of reason.”

Hunter looked from the sword, gleaming silver and he already knew brutally sharp, to the softly glowing red stone in the amulet.

“Not so long ago, I’d have grabbed the sword and legged it,” he said slowly, “but one thing Coulson taught me is that you really have to use your head. So… I’m gonna ask why I can’t take both.”

Merlyn looked completely and utterly startled. “Nobody has ever asked that before!”

“Maybe I’m just a greedy ambitious arsehole, then, but I don’t think I like being tied down to one option like that. Violence has its place, but so does reason. Violence without reason is what the cocksuckers I’m trying to stop resort to; reason without violence is something they don’t respect. So again, is there some reason why you need to hoard one of them like a dragon sitting on its gold? I won’t keep them both, if that’s what you’re worried about. Bob always was better at being the voice of reason than me. She can have the amulet.” The sword called to him; he could almost hear it in the back of his mind.

“I am afraid that won’t be possible,” Merlyn said. “Give me your hand, please, Lancelot.”

“Please stop callin’ me that, you’re makin’ me really bloody nervous.” Hunter held his hand out, and Merlyn took it between his aged, withered ones, peering at his palm. “Did Lancelot get this choice?” he suddenly thought to ask.

“No. The sword was already held by another. Britannia needed two champions at the time, so I elected to give you - Lancelot - the Amulet anyway, hoping to balance violence with reason.”

“Why do I have the feeling that didn’t turn out so well for you?”

“Do you need to ask? They were never meant to be held at the same time by two different people.” Merlyn let go of his hand, stared at him again. Hunter had the uneasy feeling that the ancient being was staring directly into his soul.

“Love was their downfall,” Merlyn said, “that they both loved the same woman, yet not enough to be able to share her. You hold in you a greater love yet; the willingness to do whatever you must to see the woman you love happy, even if it means letting her go.”

“Already did that once,” Hunter said steadily, feeling somehow more able to hold Merlyn’s gaze now.

“Perhaps my downfall was not enough faith,” Merlyn murmured, as though to himself. “Very well. Britannia needs her champions, now more than ever, yet I will not risk dividing her against herself again.” He sighed, took the amulet from the box. “Nobody will ever be able to take this from you,” he told Hunter, “not even I. Should you die, it will return here to the Heart of Avalon, as will Excalibur.”

“Wait,” Hunter’s brain finally caught up. “Wait, that’s _Excalibur?_ I thought it had to be given by the Lady of the Lake, or pulled out of a stone!”

“Roma is not here right now, and merely lifting it from the table will be proof enough of your worth,” Merlyn said with an amused smile.

“Does this mean I have to be King of England? Being filthy rich’d be nice and all, but I don’t think I’d be good at all the pomp and circumstance shit. I swear too much.”

Merlyn chuckled, standing up and moving around the table. “No, a king-champion is not what Britannia needs in this day and age.”

“I don’t think _I’m_ really what she needs either,” Hunter said, “but since I’m still ninety-nine percent sure that this is a petrol-fume hallucination, go for it, me old son.”

The amulet felt very cold as it settled around his neck. He didn’t feel any wiser, but then, he supposed, _it was a dream, so he wouldn’t, would he?_

“Take up the sword,” Merlyn said quietly, and Hunter reached out.

The worn leather-wrapped hilt felt utterly natural in his hand, and though he’d expected the blade to be heavy - Merlyn had apparently struggled to lift it - it actually felt incredibly light, like a broom handle. Standing, Hunter swished the blade experimentally a few times.

Behind him, Merlyn started chanting something, in a language was sure he’d never heard spoken before but somehow found distantly familiar, like an ache at the back of his brain. Whirling, Hunter gaped to see the magician no longer ancient, but standing tall, his hair and beard still white but his face appearing no older than middle-aged.

“Wait a fucking min…”

************

He startled awake with a yell, jerked up and smacked his head on the roof of the boot.

“Fucking _ouch!_ ”

He put a hand to the lump on his head, cursing under his breath again. “Should’ve known it was just a fuckin’ dream, no way Merlyn would give _me_ Excalibur…”

His hands were free. How the hell had he managed that? They’d been bound tightly with cable ties, more hooked around his ankles and linked to the ones on his wrists to disable him completely. The tight plastic was gone, though.

With a sudden feeling of unreality, Hunter felt at his neck. Inside his shirt was a cool lump of metal that definitely wasn’t there normally.

“So I’m still dreaming…” _and now I’m dreaming myself locked in the boot of a fuckin’ car. Why can’t I get_ good _dreams, like me and Bob on a beach in Ibiza, her wearing that little tiny teal-blue bikini…_ Twisting over, his hand brushed something cold.

Hunter froze before very carefully feeling along whatever he’d touched. If he was dreaming that sword in here, it was really, really sharp…

… it _was_ the sword. His hand closed around the warm, leather-wrapped hilt.

Hunter swallowed.

“On the off-chance that this is actually not a dream,” he said aloud, “thanks, Merlyn.”

He thought he heard the ghost of a chuckle somewhere in the back of his brain, just before he wrapped his fingers more tightly around the hilt and stabbed the sword hard through the back of the seat in front of him.

************

 

There were some thumps and thuds when the car stopped. Bobbi wasn’t quite sure what she expected to see when the trunk lid popped open, but she really hadn’t expected to see her husband, smiling cheerfully down at her.

“Hey, darlin’. You all right?”

Cramped and stiff, she blinked in the bright sunlight beaming down on her, unable to believe her eyes for a moment. “How…” There wasn’t even a mark on him. Lance had rescued her before, but she couldn’t think of a time when he’d done it without picking up at least a few contusions.

“Do you think you’re dreaming?” he asked, puzzling her immensely.

“It’s possible,” Bobbi allowed, “since I wasn’t really expecting you to escape. Farley took great pleasure in telling me all the horrible things he was planning to do with you.” The bastard had laughed at her screams of rage and fury before ordering her bound and chucked into the trunk of the car. Her last sight of Lance had been him being beaten to the ground by half a dozen of Farley’s men. Since she couldn’t see any sign of the bruises he had to have picked up in that beating, maybe she _was_ dreaming.

“If it _is_ a dream, I’m glad you’re here.”

He grinned, that old, rakish smirk that made her heart turn over in her chest. “Don’t freak out, but I’ve only got one knife to cut you loose with.”

She nearly screamed as he held up the sword. It had to be over four feet long. “Jesus Christ, Hunter, where did you get _that_?”

“That in and of itself is _quite_ a story.” Cutting the cable ties that bound her carefully, Hunter reached in to help her up. She took his hand, climbed out of the boot, and looked _up_ at him.

“Okay, so this is definitely a dream,” they both said simultaneously. Hunter looked at his feet to check that he wasn’t standing on a ledge or something, but no, his boots were on a level with Bobbi’s.

They were also dark blue, which they hadn’t been that morning.

“That’s an… interesting outfit,” Bobbi said slowly. “This is quite some dream.”

“I’ve never been taller than you even in my dreams,” Hunter said, puzzled. The boots didn’t look or feel like platforms, and he was looking down at Bobbi from about a six-inch height difference. Which should mean he was on stilts. He stamped experimentally.

“You look - bigger. Not just taller.” She touched his arm, measured the breadth of his shoulders with her hands. “You didn’t get given any super-soldier serum or anything, did you?”

“Maybe that fish oil pill finally activated or something,” Hunter shrugged off the shock, though he couldn’t quite explain the outfit. It looked like a British version of Cap’s dark blue battle suit, with deep red and thin white crosses overlaid on his chest. “Or maybe Merlyn threw the suit in along with the rest.”

“Who?”

“You know what, let’s talk about this later. I’m having a _really_ weird day, but the fact remains that I think this is a public road and we’re surrounded by dead neo-Nazis.”

He wasn’t wrong, Bobbi realised, looking around. She was in the rear of two cars pulled up at the roadside, and there were quite literally bodies spilling out of the front doors, blood pooling in sticky piles on the road from the multiple stab wounds each of them were pierced with. One of them didn’t have a head. She looked back at the sword in Lance’s hand.

“It doesn’t seem to need cleaning,” he said, correctly reading her glance. “The blood sheets right off.”

She said nothing, just took a few steps forward and peered into the back of the other car. Most of the back seat had been literally cut to pieces, bits of plastic and upholstery mingling with the blood and body parts.

“I’ve seen some crazy shit in my time,” Bobbi said slowly, “even aliens, but this is right up there, Hunter.”

“I know.” For a long moment they looked at each other, and then Hunter said, “On the very small possibility that we’re not dreaming, luv, I really think we’d better get a move on. Farley isn’t here, which means he’s somewhere else, and we need to let Wisdom know what I found in that bunker.”

He was right, and Bobbi drew on all her training, pushed aside the impossibility of what Hunter had done and the evidence of her own eyes. “Phone,” she said.

“One of them must have one,” Hunter looked around at the dead men. “And then I think we’d better get the hell out of here before anyone shows up and starts asking really awkward questions. Excalibur isn’t very easily hideable.”

“ _Exca_ \- no, you know what, I’m not ready to deal with that right now.” She’d rather search the bodies. The first’s phone had been neatly sliced in half. The second had a locked iPhone, which she could bypass with a bit of time - which they didn’t have.

The third man’s pockets turned up a wallet full of cash and a cheap, generic-brand, unlocked burner phone. Bobbi held them both up to Hunter, who nodded.

“Good job, luv!” He’d been busying himself pulling bodies out of the less messy car, the one she’d been travelling in. “Let’s go!”

She had to stare as he laid the sword down on the backseat before getting into the driver’s seat. “Shouldn’t you hide that in the trunk?”

“If we happen to run into any more of Farley’s thugs, I’m leaving it where I can get my hands on it, thanks very much,” Hunter said.

“Let me drive, then…”

“Luv, we’re in England. You know I love you, but on this side of the pond? _I_ drive.”

“On this stupid side of the road, you mean,” she grumbled, getting into the passenger seat. There’d been blood all over it, but Hunter had done a fair job of cleaning it off with one of the dead men’s jackets. They’d have to ditch the car as soon as possible anyway and find another; finding her some clean clothes at the same time shouldn’t be too hard. She slid another sideways glance at Hunter.

On the other hand, her husband and partner had now suddenly become a whole lot more noticeable than he had ever been before.

She pushed the thought away as he started the car. _Deal with what you can, right now._ The longer things went on, the more convinced she became that she wasn’t in a dream.

_Which means that seriously weird shit is going down._

Bobbi dialled Pete Wisdom’s phone number.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobbi gets to ask a few Questions.

“Don’t suppose that thing runs to GPS?” Hunter asked once she’d completed the call.

“No… you don’t know where we are, do you?” The road they were on was a fairly narrow lane, with thick hedges on either side.

“Haven’t found any signposts yet,” he said a bit defensively. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea how long we were in the cars? I was… not there for a while.”

“At least a couple hours. I got knocked on the head when they threw me in and was a bit dazed for the first part,” Bobbi admitted.

Hunter made a snarly sound of rage under his breath. “Are you all right, luv?”

“Yeah.” She put her fingers up to gingerly feel around the lump on the side of her head. “It’s fine.”

An awkward silence fell. Bobbi kept sneaking sideways glances at Hunter, taking in everything about him. He’d always been strong, but it was more a whipcord lean type of strength, not the thickly bulging muscles she could see under the suit, that she was pretty sure weren’t padding.

“So,” she said finally. “When you say you were ‘not there for a while’, what exactly does that mean? This is feeling… very real, for a dream. Even if it is deeply surreal for weird life, we’ve both seen deeply surreal shit before.”

“It just doesn’t usually happen _to_ us,” Hunter said. “More _around_ us.”

“Yeah, although specifically this has happened to _you_.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly. They arrived at a T-junction and Hunter peered at the signs pointing left and right.

“Have you ever heard of either of those towns?” Bobbi asked hopefully.

“No, but since they both begin with a double L I’m gonna assume we’re in Wales. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo… fuck it, let’s go left.”

She didn’t say anything after he’d made the turn, and as she’d known he would, Hunter started talking.

“So I was lying there in the boot thinking about how I was about to die and I realised that for the first time, I was going to die for my country rather than for anything else.”

Bobbi frowned, puzzled. “You came close a few times when you were in the SAS. The British government was paying you then.”

“No,” Hunter shook his head, frustrated with his own inability to explain. “I wouldn’t have been dying _for Britain_. In an effort _to save Britain_.”

Enlightened, Bobbi nodded. “Britain wasn’t actually ‘in danger’ then.”

“Yeah, anyway, so I was thinking that I was more than willing to give my life so you could get away…”

“Hunter!”

“... _to warn Wisdom_ ,” he said firmly. “Because Farley has to be stopped.”

She couldn’t argue with his logic. She’d willingly have given her own life for the exact same reason, even though this wasn’t her homeland, because millions of people would die if Farley _wasn’t_ stopped.

“Alright,” Bobbi said unwillingly. “So you were psyching yourself up to sacrifice yourself so I could get away to save the country.”

“Yeah, basically. An’ the next second, a voice said somethin’ about me being a surprise and I woke up in a cave with an old geezer who said he was Merlyn.”

“What, _the_ \- as in Arthur and…”

“Yup. He told me that Britain needed a champion, and offered me a choice; the Sword of Might, or something called the Amulet of Right.”

“So you took the sword.”

“No, I asked for them both.”

“ _What?!_ ”

“It was a tough choice, Bob!”

She couldn’t help it, she started to laugh. “Oh my God. You swindled Merlyn out of Excalibur and some ancient necklace of equal magic and power?”

“I did _not_ swindle him,” Hunter said with some dignity. “He thought about it and then said something about Britain needing champions who could use both violence and reason, but that giving the two of them to two different people the last time he did it didn’t end well. So he said that I should have them both. I told him I wanted you to have the amulet!”

“I’m not British, though,” against every instinct, Bobbi somehow found herself believing every word Hunter said. “So, the amulet?”

He took a hand off the wheel and fished beneath the close-fitting neck of his shirt, pulling out an ancient-looking gold pendant with a glowing red stone set it it. “Merlyn said it can’t be taken from me.”

It looked curiously right on him. “I don’t think you should try to take it off,” Bobbi said instinctively. “I think it’s important.”

“Maybe it’s like my own version of the super-serum,” Hunter said with a grin, “in which case, I’m bloody well keeping it on, luv.”

“I had no complaints before, you know that, but being Captain America’s buff Cockney cousin is a pretty good look for you.”

Hunter grinned even wider, darted a wicked glance across at her. “We’ll have to wait until we find somewhere safe to hole up before we find out if _everything_ got enhanced, luv.”

“You’ve got a filthy mind,” but she couldn’t help a snicker of laughter.

“If you tell me you weren’t wonderin’, I’ll tell you you’re lying.”

“Look!” she said, to deflect his attention, “houses!”

Hunter smirked, returning his full attention to the road ahead. “Looks like a pretty small place. Look for a pub, or better yet a petrol station.”

There didn’t appear to be one of the latter, but there was a pub, and a tiny village shop. Hunter looked way too obvious right now so Bobbi prepared to go in and play Lost Tourist.

“Since we’re in Wales,” Hunter leaned over to say as she got out of the car, “your rubbish English accent won’t attract too much attention, so you might as well try it.”

“My English accent is _not_ rubbish,” she muttered under her breath with a roll of her eyes, but if she was being honest with herself she knew she couldn’t usually fool English people with it. She might possibly get away with it in Wales, though.

There were two middle-aged women in the small shop when she entered, one behind the counter and one leaning on it, chattering away in rapid, sing-song Welsh. They stopped when she came in and stared at her wide-eyed.

“Hi,” Bobbi said with a smile, “I’m afraid we’re lost…”

“American, are you, love?” the shopkeeper asked, and Bobbi sighed mentally.

“Canadian, actually!” she lied brightly. “And I’m sorry to say that all your Welsh place names have blurred into one a bit, and my phone battery died so I don’t have GPS… do you maybe have a map?”

A crisp twenty pound note from the wallet of purloined cash ensured their cheerful assistance. Clutching the marked-up map, Bobbi headed back to the car.

“Hunter… I think we’ve got a problem.”

“Another one?” he sighed, put his forehead against the steering wheel for a moment before straightening up. “All right. Hit me with it, luv.”

“Look,” she spread the map over the dash. “We’re here.”

“Right,” he nodded, looking at the pen-marked X she pointed to. “Off the beaten track, I see. Presumably Farley was having us taken off to be dumped nicely in the middle of nowhere.”

Bobbi unfolded the next part of the map. “Or maybe not.” She tapped her finger on the large expanse of blue. “This is Lin Tegid.”

“ _Llyn_ Tegid,” Hunter corrected her pronunciation, hissing the double LL along the sides of his mouth. Bobbi gave him a Look. “It means Lake,” he added hastily.

“Yeah, I figured. The women in the shop assumed we were headed there and kindly filled me in on some facts. It just happens to be one of the largest water storage reservoirs in the country. Stores a lot of the drinking water for the north-west of the country, including Liverpool and Manchester.”

Hunter leaned over to look at the map properly, frowning. “Bala Lake, that’s the English name. Thought I recognised it. I did some SAS training round here,” he ran his finger over green areas around the map. “This river here, this is some of the roughest white-water in the world.” He traced his finger along the thin blue line to another large blue blotch, and then moved south and west to point at a third. “These three, here? Poison these three lakes and you fuck up the water supply for the entire country. You’d have to re-divert water from all over. It’d cost billions, and by the time they managed it the whole country would be in chaos. Think the Flint water supply crisis only multiplied into a scale of ten million plus people. And that doesn’t even include the number who would die outright, before the government realised the water supply was contaminated.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Bobbi said, horrified by the sheer magnitude of what Hunter was suggesting.

“Exactly.” Hunter pulled the map from under her fingers. “This is where Farley is planning to do it,” he said to himself, running his fingers thoughtfully over lines of roads and rivers. “The question is, when? Did we make him accelerate his timing?”

Bobbi was quiet, watching him think. When he was silent for a moment, she said softly “You said that you found six vials of the toxin. Six vials for six lakes?” She pointed to three other large blue shapes on the map, but Hunter shook his head.

“No. Lake Brenig and Lake Alwen are drought-usage only, backup reservoirs, and the country isn’t in drought. And Trawsfynydd isn’t for drinking water.”

“Trouser… never mind. Why not?”

Hunter smiled, still looking at the map. “Formerly used as the coolant reservoir for a now-decommissioned nuclear power station. Nobody’s drinking out of it, trust me.”

She had to smile at that. The SAS had taught Hunter a lot of things; he’d probably studied ways in which Britain might be attacked, and poisoning drinking water was highly likely to have been one of them. “So the other three vials… for use somewhere else, or are they planning to double up, dump two in each lake? It’d be overkill, considering what Farley said they could do.”

Hunter’s hand crept up unconsciously, and Bobbi watched in fascination as he touched the amulet at his throat, finger rubbing slowly over the glowing red stone. “I… think they’re backups,” he said slowly, at last. “To be held in reserve. Maybe for a second wave of attacks, if this one didn’t achieve the desired result.”

“So the question is, when, and exactly where?” Bobbi asked it softly, trying not to interrupt his near-trance. “Would Farley risk being there himself?”

“I think he’d want to be, yeah. There was equipment in that bunker that I reckon was designed to release the toxin on a time-delay. Throw the capsule into the lake and it gets released a few hours later.”

“They could throw it in literally anywhere,” Bobbi said, horrified.

“Well, yes and no. There aren’t many roads around here, luv,” Hunter glanced up at her and grinned.

“I see that, but the ones that there are appear to run scenically along the lake shores,” Bobbi pointed out tartly. “Great for tourists, not so convenient for us.”

“These aren’t the Great Lakes. Bala Lake’s only about three miles long, the other two are smaller. All those roads can be closed at either end, and good bloody luck reaching the lakes on foot. This is rough country, Bob. Nobody much really lives around here.” He tapped his fingers on the map again thoughtfully and then said “I think you’d better call Pete Wisdom back.”

Bobbi had disassembled the stolen phone, to prevent it possibly being tracked. She put it back together as Hunter drove them out of the small village, apparently sure of his destination now.

“You’d better let me talk to him,” Hunter said as Bobbi dialled. “I know the lay of the land here, and I think I might know what Farley’s up to and where he might be headed.”

She didn’t argue, just dialled and put the phone on speaker, listening as Hunter briefed Wisdom succinctly on their conclusions. Hunter didn’t mention his own transformation, not yet anyway. Just told Wisdom that they were going to a town called Bala because he suspected Farley might head there.

“It’s a central point, and the dickhead’s a control freak,” Hunter said. “Rich and vicious, but completely untrained in practical operational techniques. I reckon he’s gonna try and gather his people for a pre-mission briefing, literally right where they’re gonna carry it out.”

Bobbi almost scoffed, but then she re-thought that and realised Hunter could well be right. It did fit with Farley’s personality type. She just hadn’t expected _Hunter_ to make that assessment. Her eyes fell to the amulet around his neck again. Wisdom was promising to get the local police and the military on the case, closing the lakeside roads and scrambling helicopters to detain any cars already travelling on them.

“We’ll be at Bala in about fifteen minutes,” Hunter said, “we’ll head for the lakefront and keep our eyes open. It’s possible if Farley figures we’re onto him, if he realises he can’t contact any of the men who were with us, he might just head for the water and chuck one of the canisters in.”

“I don’t think I need to tell you to prevent that at all costs?” Wisdom said dryly.

“Nope, we pretty much got that, sir,” Bobbi put in.

“Good luck, both of you. I’m on my way.” They could hear the sound of aircraft engines in the background. “And bloody well done,” Wisdom added.

“Don’t say that yet. Job’s not finished,” Hunter replied.

“Then get it done,” Wisdom said, before pausing. “Don’t die out there, you two. I want you alive to collect the fucking big bonuses I’m going to extort out of my bosses for you.”

“There’s a man who speaks my language,” Hunter grinned once Bobbi had cut the line. She smiled across at him, taking the phone apart again.

“You heard the man. Let’s get the job finished. I’m curious to see what else about you has changed.”

He chuckled quietly, pressing his foot down harder on the accelerator. “Bloody Farley, he’s a damn inconvenience. Getting in the way of our sex lives.”


End file.
